Rhode Island Red Read Free

statement. As we talked, the technicians started to file in—all looking as if they had TB. My little apartment, so private and anonymous until a few short hours ago, was swollen with city payrollers. All of them men. Loud and gross and way past the point of caring. The one slobbering all over my busted door looked ready to shed his old skin any minute.
    â€œHow come you didn’t hear anything?” Butko asked me.
    â€œFor the same reason,” I told him, “I wouldn’t hear it if you played a rap song in this room right now.”
    My hatred for rap music was so overwhelming that I had actually developed the ability to tune it out—deny that it existed. I hated violent death just as much. Yet Sig’s body was still there in my kitchen.
    Then, about five-thirty in the morning, the clock stopped, so to speak. The apartment was at capacity now, but it had grown strangely quiet. They were all standing around … waiting. Poor Sig/Conlin was waiting too, in his way.
    I wanted nothing more at the moment than a piece of paper and a pencil.
    I mean, I know how crass it sounds, a young guy laying there dead and all. But since there was nothing anybody could do to change that, I thought the least I could do was get off a few lines about the thing. All the time I was speaking to Butko, the words were sort of floating across my eyes like they were being spat out of a teletype machine. Something like “Butterflies never die but just tremble and vanish.” Lord! … butterflies trembling and vanishing would have made my grad school advisor at NYU vomit. But that was last year and this was this year.
    I took down the big glass percolator my mother had given me. She had somehow managed to ignore every reminder over the years that I despised perked coffee and never used anything but a drip pot. I wonder where I get my willful nature from. For a few minutes everyone watched hypnotized while the glass pot bubbled and shook. I don’t know when it happened, but a minute later I realized that all eyes had turned to me.
    The nightgown I had on was right out of George Sand. Good cotton, good lace and loads of it, hand rolled hem, and diaphanous as hell. I looked down furtively and saw how clearly, aggressively, my dark breasts were outlined against the fabric. I felt a stab of shame for every time I had lain there, proud, loving it, while a man delighted in them.
    Each and every one of these strange men was looking at my nipples—focusing—concentrating—on them. And it meant nothing to them that they were dealing with a lady who was going to do the definitive translation of A Season in Hell .
    I wondered briefly, insanely, if this was going to escalate one glance, one wordless movement at a time, until I ended up raped and torn apart and dead—framed, conveniently, for Officer Conlin’s murder. It would be one of those grotesque cover-ups no one would find out about for forty years.
    For whom should I whore?
    The first line of my Rimbaud translation came back to me then.
    For whom should I whore
    Which beast shall I worship?
    What madonna should I ravish?
    What heart should I profane?
    What lies should I live by?
    In whose blood should I swim?
    The committee had thrown the thesis right back in my face thanks to that translation.
    I was relieved to see that the men had stopped staring. Except Sig, of course. How long were they going to leave that dead man there?
    â€œFor godsakes,” I said to Butko, “can’t you at least pull that knife out of his neck?”
    â€œNot a knife, honey,” he said, searching for sugar in the cabinet above my refrigerator. “It’s an ice pick.”
    Who was he calling honey, and where the fuck did he think he was—Little Rock?
    Before I could ask, a black man burst though the half-open door, scattering lab men like milk bottles. He had a baseball hat turned around backwards on his head. And he was wearing painter’s